On Mars, at the coordinates 19°20′ N, 33°33′ W., a small self-propelled vehicle stands covered in sand. And not far from it is a monument to the man whose book you are now holding in your hands. This is the Karl Sagan Memorial Station. In July 1997, it brought the self-propelled rover Passfinder here and then transmitted images from its video camera to Earth for almost three months. In reality, the Passfinder’s journey across the surface of the red planet was far more modest than the plan Sagan had envisioned, but the level of public interest in the mission was right. That summer, reports from Mars were an indispensable part of the evening television news. Except that Sagan himself did not live to see his idea realized.
The monument on Mars is not the only remarkable fact associated with the name of the man who can be safely called the most famous popularizer of science in the twentieth century. In Sagan, the austere realism of the scientist and the charismatic intensity of the emotions of the irrepressible romantic were intricately combined. His irreconcilable struggle against pseudo-science and superstition, mysticism and dogmatism turned into groundless accusations by his opponents that he was turning science itself into a subject of religious worship. At the same time, his tireless popularization activity and desire to tell about the most difficult scientific problems in accessible language and always fascinating way sometimes caused reproaches from his conservative colleagues, who believed that a real scientist should not speak so emotionally in night talk shows and in general it is better to stay away from the attention of the “uninitiated” public. To a large extent because of this, Sagan was voted out of the National Academy of Sciences. Curiously enough, the same Academy later gave him its most prestigious award, the Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Application of Science for the Benefit of Society. But let us not get ahead of ourselves.
Carl Edward Sagan was born in New York on November 9, 1934. As a child, he read science fiction. The question of the existence of life and mind outside the Earth stirred his imagination. By the age of 12, he was already determined to be an astronomer and was quickly moving toward his goal. In 1951, at the age of 16, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, received a bachelor’s degree at 19, and by the age of 25, was a doctor of astronomy and astrophysics. Tasked with the goal of searching for extraterrestrial life, Sagan does not forget about biology. In his student years he works as a lab technician for the Nobel Prize winner geneticist H. Möller. Here his ideas about biological evolution are formed. The scientific level of Sagan in the field of biological sciences is evidenced by the fact that he was commissioned by the Encyclopedia Britannica to write the article “Life”.
In the 1960s, Sagan works at the York and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatories and teaches astronomy at Harvard University. In 1968 he became professor of astronomy and space research at Cornell University. Here he creates a laboratory for the study of the planets, where he worked for the rest of his life.
Sagan repeatedly emphasized that he was lucky to live in an era when mankind began to explore space. Since the beginning of the American space program, he has participated in NASA projects to explore the planets of the solar system in the hope of discovering traces of life on them. With his direct participation the riddle of high temperatures on Venus was solved, the causes of seasonal changes on the surface of Mars were understood, the color of Titan’s atmosphere was explained. About all this and tells in the book “Space.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has always been colored by romance, but Sagan is not attracted to the easy way of indulging his own imagination that ufologists follow. He approaches the question of the existence of life on other planets as an extremely important, interesting, complex, but strictly scientific task.